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"In the beginning" - Amarok 2.0 released

December 10, 2008 - 13:02 — nightrose

The world of digital music management has changed a great deal since the birth of Amarok four and a half years ago. Amarok 1 established a reputation for innovation, but maintaining development with the old framework became more difficult as Amarok grew, often in directions we never imagined. KDE4 brings many new technologies and design patterns, and we decided to use this opportunity to improve upon Amarok's original design. We thought about how to best design a program that would allow us to stay at the cutting edge of digital music management. We also sought to distinguish Amarok in an increasingly saturated market of music players. To achieve this we took the best ideas from the 1.x series, and brainstormed what else we could do to help our users "rediscover music". And then we started developing.

Now, after two years of development, we are proud to announce that Amarok 2 has arrived. This arrival is just the beginning.This new version brings with it a lot of changes:

Completely redesigned user interface

Tight integration with online services such as Magnatune, Jamendo, MP3tunes, Last.fm and Shoutcast

Completely overhauled scripting API and plugin support to allow better integration into Amarok

Migration from the KDE 3 to KDE 4 framework, and utilization of core technologies such as Solid, Phonon, and Plasma

The user interface has been redesigned to make context information like lyrics and albums from the same artist more accessible and allow you to decide which information you want to see by adding applets to the Context View in the middle. The new Biased Playlists offer a way to let Amarok take care of your playlist in an intelligent way similar to Dynamic Playlists in previous versions. A new service framework allows for a tight integration of online services like Jamendo, Magnatune and Ampache. New services can easily be added via GetHotNewStuff in Amarok or from kde-apps.org. More applets and scripts are being worked on and users are welcome to contribute more to make Amarok suit their needs. The migration from the KDE 3 to KDE 4 framework allows us to make use of technologies like Plasma, Phonon and Solid which make Amarok easier to use and maintain and ready for the future of music on your computer and on the internet.
These are only some of the great new features of Amarok 2. Give it a try!

It is important to note that Amarok 2.0 is a beginning, not an end. Because of the major changes required, not all features from the 1.4 are in Amarok 2. Many of these missing features, like queueing and filtering in the playlist, will return within a few releases. Other features, such as visualizations and support for portable media players, require improvements in the underlying KDE infrastructure. They will return as KDE4's support improves. Some features, such as the player window or support for databases other than MySQL, have been removed because either they posed insurmountable programming problems, or they didn't fit our design decisions about how to distinguish Amarok in a saturated market of music players.

Amarok 2.0 is now available for all major Linux distributions. KDE4 is still under heavy development especially on Windows and Mac OS X, and Amarok 2 is available as a "Beta" version on those platforms. In the coming months, we expect to regularly release a series of bugfix versions in the 2.0 series. Work on features, both old and new, has also continued. So while Amarok 2 has already been a long journey for the Amarok team, for you, the users, it is just beginning!

Amarok's journey has just begun and we are excited to have you join us for this event. Change and improvement would not have been possible without the help of everyone who contributed to this ambitious project in the form of code, promotion, documentation, donations, and a lot more. To all of you we say: Thank You!

Congratulation to the release! You did an awesome job! But I have some comments about the new UI:

I find the UI a bit confusing/organized (http://amarok.kde.org/files/Amarok-2_0_0-Magnatune.png):
- too many thinks marked with blue
- albums on the right should visually encapsulate the songs better and have a bigger separation to the next album
- play/pause/.. buttons should be seperate and not combined together
- bars in the top don't align on the right
- volume bar looks like its just put in there
- tabs would be better than buttons for the left side (collection/internet/...)

First of all my heartiest congratulation for the release of 2.0 :) Keep rocking...

The other thing that I noticed is that Amarok Download Page hasn't been updated, currently only Mandriva and Fedora are having Amarok 2 in their "Main" Repositories and the download page still shows that Mandriva has 1.4.10 in repos ?/

Please fix it asap..

Hoping for more rocking release in future ;) Keep up the great work going :)

Amarok 1.x was indeed the best audo player. Amarok 2.x must change the name as it has nothing with good audio player at all - it is something to sell (probably), rather to use. Hey, I see, you are trying to find fans among mp3/pepsi/beer community. You will. But *music* fans are no more (so called) Amarok 2.x users. Sorry.

"something to sell" sell what? to whom? Amarok is Free ( as in beer _and_ as in speech ) and its GPL license guarantees that it will remain that way.

"trying to find fans among mp3/pepsi/beer community" huh? seriously, huh!?! You obviously have a twisted idea of what demographic we are aiming at. The truth is that we are aiming squarely at ourselves, as we are some of the biggest music fans out there (why would you even be involved in a project like Amarok otherwise).

Now, had you posted a comment saying that you do not like Amarok 2 because it does not fit with your particular usage pattern, that you do not like he look, that you think it is currently unstable or pretty much any other reason that does not include strange mind twisting delusions like those above, I would likely have responded that we knew that Amarok 2.0.0 would not be for everyone. Some features are currently missing (something we have been very up front about for a long time, even in the release announcement) but will be re-added soon. If these are a huge issue for you, then I would have recommended that you stay with Amarok 1.4.x for the time being, until Amarok 2 matures a bit. We have also made some rather drastic design changes ( stuff that is not just "not yet ported features", and some of these might be fundamentally incompatible with what you want from a music player. This is also valid, and in that case I would likely have tried to point you in the direction that better fits your needs. But as it stands, the only thing you post are strange assumptions abut out goals for Amarok 2, none of which fall anywhere near the truth, so the only thing I can tell you is that if your really have that little faith in us (and remember, the people who have created 2.0.0 are much the same as those that created 1.4.x) then you are truly better of elsewhere.

Sorry, Andrew Gaydenko, but if you don't have anything constructive to say (what exactly bothers you so much and how exactly would you improve it) you better not post at all. I for one am a big music fan and for me Amaroik 2 is a big step in the right direction. Sure I miss a few features, but nothing big, The improvements in Amarok 2 overweight this. And I also see the huge potencial that the new version based on all the new technologies has. So great work Amarok developers and keep up the great job.

But at least for me this did not work out. I tried to import my 1.4 collection and an error came up telling me that it could not connect to the database.
This might be due to the Kubuntu packages or a quirk in Amarok 2 itself.

I don't want to lose my stats (especially ratings and playcounts, which are very important for my dynamic playlists), thus I changed back to 1.4 until this is resolved.

it doesn't look gray at all here. What is great about Amarok is that it respects the widgets theme and colors I set for my entire desktop. That way all the apps, including Amarok, look as I want them and are consistent in look. So if you don't like the W95 look just don't use the colors and theme that look like it and it will all be fine.

I'm using Amarok from trunk since times, and it seems Amarok 2 is like KDE4.0: Unfinished, ugly and hurting badly .... but with strong tech pillars and very nice ideas. When i see how *nice* KDE is becoming with 4.2+, i'm quite confident for Amarok too.

The plasma use of Amarok is a good idea, giving lot of freedom. And even if the defaut UI is, for now, painful, this mockups are really great vision of what Amarok could be in the future.

I love you all who made this release of Amarok 2.0 possible! It is a big advance over the previous version, especially for me because I'm still forced to use Windows on the computer at work. Well at least now I can install Amarok 2 on it. Thanks!

BTW is there something wrong with Digg? 200 diggs in 6 hours and the story still isn't on the front page. Should we report bug to http://digg.com/bugreport ?

There are bound to be some dissatisfied users, partly because of the missing features, but mostly to the change of the UI. Just like it was with KDE 4.o. But it is to be expected. Inertia is a very powerful thing.

The main thing is that you [devs] don't get disappointed. And that you continue your work, because for each loud-mouth that complains there are tens or hundreds of silent users that enjoy the new version!